Roberto Damatta: Barbosa would win in the first round.

247 - Roberto Damatta would vote for Joaquim Barbosa for president. And he believes that he would even win in the first round of the election, he said in an article published in the newspaper O Globo this Wednesday, the 8th. For him, however, there is a "but": since the president of the Supreme Federal Court stated that newspapers are leaning to the right, he has "lost sight of the socio-political context of Brazil".

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Right & Left

Today I'll start with thorns — with a duality that defines our world. What is the central point of the opposition between left and right — this dualism that has led so many people (on both sides) to prison, torture, exile, abandonment, rejection, and death? What direction are these sides taking?

I think the worst response would be to anchor them in fundamentalism: in an opposition with definitive content. One being correct and the other wrong, since we know that right and left allow for infinite segmentations, because every left has a more left-leaning left; just as every right also has its extremely right-leaning right. On the religious level we are still dominated by the sacred (situated to the "right" of the Father); but on the political level nobody—at least in Brazil—is "right-wing." Just as nobody is rich or powerful.

Could God and the Devil be avatars of this duality? But don't dualities tend to disappear when we approach them? Furthermore, aren't dualisms, as an old text by Lévi-Strauss suggests, ways of concealing hierarchies because a perfect balance never exists, and duality perfectly mystifies the multiple differences between groups and people, lumping everything together on one side or the other?

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Federal Court, Joaquim Barbosa—after making an impeccable diagnosis of our hierarchy and our personalism that leads to the indexing of individuals, removing them from the universality of the law; these central dimensions of my work interpreting Brazil—said that the country's main newspapers were aligning themselves with the right. Joaquim Barbosa would be my definitive candidate for president of the republic, and I am certain he would win in the first round, but in expressing such an opinion, I believe, with due respect, that he lost sight of the socio-political context of Brazil.

Newspapers are on the "right" because the entire government (and, with it, almost the entire Brazilian state) is encompassed within a "left" of statist policies that masks the political dualism inaugurated with the French Revolution. The reason for the state figuring as our most important and decisive political actor reveals an important fact: the belief that our malformed, mixed-race, and sick society (destined, as Gobineau and Agassiz said, to extinction by the diseases of miscegenation) had to be corrected by a centralizing, authoritarian, aristocratic "public power" that would sweep away its primitive, hybrid, intolerable, and backward customs.

The "left" has always centered on the idea that only a "strong state" could straighten out the vices, as Azevedo Amaral said, of Brazilian society. These depravities—carnival, food, sensuality, dance, laziness, popular music...—of origin. Vices that a State properly "taken over" by well-prepared people (honesty was irrelevant because it was not a matter of "morality," but of "politics") would change through decrees.

It is no coincidence that the left has suffered from statophilia, statism, and statolatry. Hence its allergy to everything that comes from society and its citizens. Dark things like meritocracy, profit, ambition, the market, competition, and efficiency. Everything that affirms a non-deterministic view of the world.

Thanks to the Attorney General's Office and the Supreme Federal Court, we are living through a special moment because the "left" has been put to the test and, consequently, relentlessly exposed. Put to the ultimate test of power, it has revealed itself incapable of fulfilling its social roles in public administration and of saying no to its most authoritarian projects. The result has been a reaction aimed at modifying, by decree, mechanisms that seek to restrict the press, the judiciary, and the public prosecutor's office. The ideal, as I see it, would be a total aristocratization of elected officials, making them unaccountable. Would this be something left-wing or right-wing?

One of the strengths of democracy, as Tocqueville saw, is the continuous education of one's lifestyle. The very division of powers demands empathy, not antipathy, between them. Similarly, democracy leads to a vision that extends beyond the economic, the political, the religious, and the legal. It is precisely this effort towards a comprehensive vision that compels open societies to continually redefine themselves through the common sense that Joaquim Barbosa possesses in abundance.

Now, this is the exact opposite of those who want left and right to be the ultimate defining terms when what the moment demands is that this powerful dualism be like our hands. These marvelous organs that make us human and that can be used in diverse ways because, as liberals know, both have an alternating use and are important in our personal and collective lives.